Thursday, 22 April 2004

My car went in for a (scheduled) service today. I asked the garage whether the driver's side mirror housing, which I broke about six months ago (reversing in the dark down my parents' driveway, I encountered a tree...) would pass the MOT (British yearly vehicle inspection, for any foreigners reading). Their considered opinion was that it wouldn't. The whole unit, mirror, housing and all, would need to be replaced.

Of course, the most expensive part of fitting a new mirror is painting the body-coloured back piece of the housing the same colour as the car. This part is available separately on the Focus, but I'd broken the main body of the housing, so the whole lot had to be replaced.

I got a call halfway through the day saying that they'd performed the MOT and it had passed, but they'd discovered that one of the rear brake cylinders (a hydraulic item which presses the brake pads against the drum) was leaking and should be replaced. Did I want to replace it? If it had been something like a cracked bumper, I'd have said no. But brakes are an essential safety item - despite costing £100, it needed to be done.

So, a third year (37,500 mile) service, plus the mirror, plus the MOT, plus the brake cylinder, plus VAT at 17.5% came to over £500. Ouch.

Oh well, at least it was scheduled, unlike my boss's car battery. /me smirks. During the time I've had the Focus, my boss has had a Mercedes SLK, a Mercedes C-class, and now has a BMW 5-series. The SLK had problems with the roof, the C-class I'm not sure of (perhaps he just didn't like it), and the 5-series can't keep a battery charge.

Something you might consider odd is that while I live in Reading, I had the car serviced at Marlow. I work in Cookham. Why not service it in Reading? Two reasons. Firstly, Reg Vardy run both the Reading Ford garages, and they're - how shall I put this? - crap. Platts at Marlow are a lot better, or so it seems. Secondly, it's actually more convenient to drive to Marlow and get a train back to Cookham (takes 15 minutes, but only once an hour) than it is to drive through Reading town centre, drop the car off, then get a bus back to Reading station, a train to Maidenhead, then change to the once-an-hour train to Cookham - and vice versa at the end of the day.

Tuesday, 20 April 2004

Thursday, 15 April 2004

US bloggers and websites are all talking about having to do tax returns today. Thank any gods that might be around that I don't have to do one - it's actually very unusual for UK residents with 'normal' tax affairs.

Anyway, the point of this post was to point to yesterday's WLCD comic. An interesting point on how you think differently if you don't have lots of resources.

The Windows Update servers have been under pretty serious stress over the last couple of days. Ironically, by encouraging everyone to turn on Automatic Updates, Microsoft have built a distributed Denial-of-Service system - that attacks their own site.

The Automatic Updates tool checks for any updates whenever your network is idle. (Anyone whose connection is charged per-byte should now go and turn it off!) If it finds any, it starts downloading them in the background, depending on how it's configured.

Those of us east of the US were probably out of the office when the latest set of updates were posted, at 10am PST, or (IIRC) 5pm GMT. Everyone whose computer was turned on queried the servers, found the updates, and started downloading...

If you're in a networked environment, you should look into getting Windows Update Services/Software Update Services. For administrators, this allows staging and testing of updates before deploying to workstations. It should reduce your network bandwidth as well as alleviating the load on the servers.

I really need to sort out my news synchronisation. I read my feeds both at work and at home - the same set of feeds. At work I'm using Awasu and at home, NewsGator.

I spend quite a bit of time marking posts I've already read, as read - a task which is relatively tricky in Awasu.

Why use two aggregators? I don't really want to use NewsGator at work as I feel it would get in the way of what I'm supposed to be doing with Outlook, i.e. working, but then it doesn't seem possible to collect all new posts from all blogs into a single notification in Awasu, so I might change.

With respect to synchronisation, I don't want to pay for NewsGator Online Services. Maybe I need to write an Outlook plugin (no! not another one! it's slow enough already with SpamBayes, SpamNet and NewsGator!) which can do the sync for me. Of course it ought to use SIAM, but it'll probably end up being FTP (or could I just FTP a SIAM file?)

Sunday, 4 April 2004

First off, let's consider that save dialog. A few questions immediately spring to mind:

How do I overwrite an existing file?

How can I have confidence I'm pointing to the right folder?

The list of files, even though it takes up screen space, allows two things to happen. You can overwrite an existing file by clicking it then clicking OK. You can be sure you're in the right folder, because you can see what else is in it.

It's well-known that users find a list of items easier to manipulate than a drop-down, so I'd argue that Windows' Places Bar is simpler than GNOME's Save In Folder drop-down. Windows appears to have a problem with this when using very large icons, where the bottom icon's label is clipped; however, this dialog is resizable.

There is one good thing about GNOME's Save dialog: the file-type drop-down shows the icon that will be used for the file. The dialog has too many buttons in the upper-right corner: do you really want to minimize a save dialog? What happens if you maximize it: do you get a full-screen dialog with massive edit fields? This is a form that shouldn't resize.

I then find this statement typical: "True, the dialogs may irk those who like tab completion and other esoteric features (I'm guessing their issues will be worked out in future releases)..."

Tab completion? In a selector box? Are you completely insane? It's very, very, very advanced users who will type a path into the File Name box to navigate to a different folder.

Simple Menus and Program Names

"Because free software environments like GNOME are founded upon cooperative development they can avoid the problems caused by corporate competition and branding. A user in Windows XP will have to navigate Windows Media Player, Real Networks Real Player and Apple Quick time in order to play media files. Their applications menu will be cluttered and the number of interfaces to learn is higher than in GNOME where a user must only find and learn Totem Movie Player."

As I've written before, everything would be a lot simpler for Windows users if Real and Apple would follow the platform conventions, DivXNetworks and the XviD project, and write their format decoders as codec DLLs, then write their players in terms of codecs. The user's choice of player would then be able to play any of the common formats - even without licensing those formats. But therein lies the problem - and it's also a problem for GNOME, because Real and Apple want to make money out of their formats.

XviD is probably contravening the MPEG-4 patents.

Simple Configuration Tools and Preferences

The Wallpaper Chooser link is broken, so I can't challenge that. In Windows, the Desktop tab of the Display properties is hardly difficult to find. The Position and Color drop-downs take a bit of thought, but not much. The Customize Desktop button is probably misplaced - maybe an Advanced button instead? Fewer options here would suggest fewer choices.

Yes, the IE preferences dialog is a lot busier. It also has many more options than Epiphany. You're trying to compare the interface of a Mercedes E-class with satellite navigation and CD auto-changer to that of a Ford Fiesta with a radio - of course it has more buttons!

Applications - Multimedia

Again, here you're comparing a really basic application with a complicated one. Totem offers no support for playlists, Internet Radio, CD ripping, copying to a portable device, organising your music library, selecting from that library. It's your choice whether these features are included in your media player, but condemning Media Player's interface because it has all these features is ridiculous. The basic operation is pretty simple: once you've ripped a CD, it appears in Media Library; hit the arrow next to Now Playing to get a menu of albums, artists etc, then select what you want to play. The Albums menu could be clearer: at work I have Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Greatest Hits and Queen's Greatest Hits I and II. The Albums menu simply shows the album name. However, there's always Media Library.

On top of this, if you want a simpler interface to Media Player, it's actually quite easy to write one. The reason is that the core of Windows Media Player is written as an ActiveX control, and you can write your own wrapper around that. The 'Windows Media Player' executable, at base, is simply a skinning engine that wraps the player control.

The bottom panel shown in the screenshot in this article isn't even shown by default in WMP.

As for WMP's 'bloated menus', they have to be: every feature that's exposed in the UI is also exposed in a menu somewhere.